Email outage for Cox subscribers hits a few San Diegans

Major outage centered in Midwest and East, but some locals say they lost service, too

A major email outage for Cox Communications customers in the East and Midwest over the weekend apparently affected a few San Diego Cox subscribers, who reported to U-T San Diego that they lost service.

A spokesman for the cable company said Cox’s systems on the West Coast were not affected by the outage except for an hour long period Monday, when the company rebooted email service as part of its work to bring the system back up in the East and Midwest.

But one San Diego subscriber reported being without email all weekend, and another had difficulty calling up emails on Saturday.

Cox’s email service went down Friday in several Midwest and East Coast states because of a platform failure, said company spokesman Todd Smith.

No emails were lost, said Smith. Service was restored Monday, with the backlog of undelivered emails slowing beginning to arrive for customers. The emails won’t arrive in chronological order, the company said .

“They’ll see them coming into their email boxes over the next couple of days,” said Smith. “It’s a whole lot of email, and we want to be careful that we don’t shock the system or create undue stress.”

Smith said it is possible that some Cox email customers on the West Coast lost their service, but he added that only a “handful” would have likely been hit because of the unusual technical circumstances required for the outage to extend beyond the Midwest.

In a statement, Cox said it is moving forward with replacing email storage platform equipment. The outage did not affect Cox voice, video and Internet services. The company has about 500,000 subscribers in San Diego.